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The Black Hole photo is epic and kind of Orange (with some Dutchies involved in the making)

Innovation
Kavana Desai
Kavana Desai
Last updated
1 minute read
The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) — a planet-scale array of eight ground-based radio telescopes forged through international collaboration — was designed to capture images of a black hole. In coordinated press conferences across the globe, EHT researchers revealed that they succeeded, unveiling the first direct visual evidence of the supermassive black hole in the centre of Messier 87 and its shadow. The shadow of a black hole seen here is the closest we can come to an image of the black hole itself, a completely dark object from which light cannot escape. The black hole’s boundary — the event horizon from which the EHT takes its name — is around 2.5 times smaller than the shadow it casts and measures just under 40 billion km across. While this may sound large, this ring is only about 40 microarcseconds across — equivalent to measuring the length of a credit card on the surface of the Moon. Although the telescopes making up the EHT are not physically connected, they are able to synchronize their recorded data with atomic clocks — hydrogen masers — which precisely time their observations. These observations were collected at a wavelength of 1.3 mm during a 2017 global campaign. Each telescope of the EHT produced enormous amounts of data – roughly 350 terabytes per day – which was stored on high-performance helium-filled hard drives. These data were flown to highly specialised supercomputers — known as correlators — at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy and MIT Haystack Observatory to be combined. They were then painstakingly converted into an image using novel computational tools developed by the collaboration.

“It’s like looking at the gates of hell”

For the first time ever, we now have a photo of a black hole and its shadow. Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), a network of 8 radio telescopes, was used to take this picture. The astronomers involved in this project come from Radbound University, University of Amsterdam, Leiden University, NOVA-technical submm-group of the University of Groningen and JIVE. 

This black hole is 55 million light-years away from Earth and 6.5 billion times the mass of the Sun. They are cosmic objects with a lot of mass, but are small in size, where they have a massive gravitational effect on its environment.

First image of a black hole: Who should we thank?

Sheperd S. Doeleman, the director of the EHT Project said a huge milestone in astronomy has been reached because of the team of over 200 researchers from 18 different countries. Stephen Hawking would have been proud!

The team observed two black holes over several days in April 2017 – one in the galaxy Messier 87 and one in the center of the Milky Way called Sagittarius A*. They combined the data they got from the 8 telescopes in the network, and found out they could get a clear picture of the one in M87. Now that they have successfully gotten that, they are going to turn their attention to Sagittarius A*.

Did the Netherlands have a part to play?

Amongst them was a team of 10 researchers and students from Radbound University. They were on this project for the last two years so that we can have this image. They were present when different observations were made with the different telescopes, contributed to data analysis and development of theoretical models.

University of Amsterdam also contributed in modelling and interpretation, the Allegro group of the Leiden Observatory played a part in the calibration of observation, JIVE helped with the data-analysis software, and NOVA submm group of the University of Groningen helped with specialised equipment.

How cool is this, right? So many mysteries of the universe still left to be unlocked, such little time.

Source feat pic:(c) EHT Collaboration

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Kavana Desai
Kavana Desaihttps://medium.com/@kavanadesai
Coping with the aftermath of her 3-year stint in the Netherlands, Kavana is a writer, content creator and editor for DutchReview. Hailing from India, she frequently blogs about the Netherlands, being Indian in the Netherlands, and everything in between. She envisions herself to one day be the youngest person to win that Nobel Prize for Literature (she is also not very humble but welcomes only constructive criticism). In the meantime, she fills her days with writing for DutchReview, writing her master's thesis on art theft, and writing fiction that will hopefully see the light of day soon.

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